I'm trying it out right now. For a beta, it seems pretty solid. I was willing to try anything after the hiccups and hurdles from updating to Firefox 3. (my bookmarks file reverted to an earlier version, it was because I had installed a beta then uninstalled it, recovery was simple enough, but now sometimes the bookmarks in the toolbar don't show up and the whole window "shakes")That said, it seems this text input box is behaving weirdly. Ads are showing up, something I haven't seen in a while thanks to adblock. I do like the core concepts in it (read the comic that Google made to go with it), but it hasn't done much for general browsing speeds, seems a bit slower than ff actually.

I'm also browsing from it now... I'm not that technical a software person, but I have no complaints just yet. I also thought the comic made alot of sense in the concepts it presented, and WebCT (which is a hideously huge java thing my school uses) loads a crapton faster, but otherwise I don't notice too much of a difference.

I tried it a bit last night, and at work today. It's not going to replace Firefox for me yet, but it's got some interesting ideas. I like the emphasis on devoting as much space as possible to the contents of the web page itself. My favoured design philosophy is generally that most GUIs should try to be as invisible as possible. On that note, I'm sure the address bar is that size to aid readability, but I can read smaller text, so I'd kind of like to shrink it to get those few extra pixels. I'm also not too sure about the bookmarking system, although I guess I can just launch bookmarks from new tabs. I'd have to alter my browsing habits to get used to that launch page thing they have, but it seems like a combination of good features from Firefox and its extensions.

I like that the tabs are separate processes, too. I'm not sure if that carries much of an additional overhead with it, but I'm pretty fed up with one tab bringing the whole browser down. That doesn't mean that the whole of Chrome can't get locked up for a while, though. I was watching some Flash video and the whole thing stopped; after a minute a dialogue popped up telling me Shockwave was unresponsive and asking me whether I wanted to kill it. So tabs aren't completely independent of one another's performance, but hopefully it means you'll never have them all lock up completely. Or at least that it will be more rare.

I did find that Flash content was less stable, but I guess it's still early days for that sort of bug fixing and optimization.

My main complaint is that it should be more customizable. Extensions would be great, of course. Not having Adblock is why I'm browsing Spamusement in Firefox at the moment rather than experimenting with Chrome further.

The developers themselves have said that they don't mind if Chrome doesn't take over the work, as long as it provokes other browser developers to rethink some things. I think it certainly has potential in that respect. I guess IE went through a fairly comprehensive redesign a while back, but the difference was that that was rubbish and I didn't like it.

It's odd. I like some things, but it's not very flexible yet, and a little buggy. It was doing odd things with the spamusement text box just now as I was posting, so I switched browsers.

From what I've read, it's made out of the same open-source (Mozilla) browseware that powers Firefox, btw.

Their stated purpose, apparently, is to try and pry the browser market open further by eating into IE's dominance, which would undoubtedly benefit Google indirectly. I wonder how effective that'll be, however, since people actually willing to go try another browser already have a major and several minor alternatives, and it'll probably pull more users from them than it will from Microsoft.

The thing I found hilarious was that one of the very few options it gives you is to open an "incognito" window -- i.e. no saved cookies, no browser history, &c. They stopped short of calling the menu choice "browse some pr0nz" . . .

catastrophile wrote:It was doing odd things with the spamusement text box just now as I was posting

It's bugging me too, but LOOK! You can resize it.

catastrophile wrote:From what I've read, it's made out of the same open-source (Mozilla) browseware that powers Firefox, btw.

Actually, its based on WebKit. That powers Safari among other things. Firefox uses Gecko.

catastrophile wrote:Their stated purpose, apparently, is to try and pry the browser market open further by eating into IE's dominance

I read (no idea on the reliability on the figure) that it has grabbed a 3% share already. If true, that's an amazing feat. It may have helped that anybody that has Google as a homepage has the link right in front of them.

catastrophile wrote:The thing I found hilarious was that one of the very few options it gives you is to open an "incognito" window -- i.e. no saved cookies, no browser history, &c. They stopped short of calling the menu choice "browse some pr0nz" . . .

IE8 is supposed to feature this as well, but so far it's only in beta....

also, privacy is turning out to be a big issue with chrome, and this is also just the beta version. i don't install the google toolbar or desktop for these same reasons, why would i install a browser that does this too?

ntw3001 wrote:Sass has to come from the heart, not from the shirt.

traubster wrote:I find it irritating whenever I walk through a cemetery and there's not one gravestone that reads something like, "We're all grateful that he's dead. Sorry if he owed you money."

I don't know how actively people consider that in order to make suggestions, something has to look at what you're typing . . . but I don't think I'd call this a "big" issue. It's not as if things you type into the address bar or a search box are going to be secret just because you use Firefox.

Tracking search habits by user means more effective suggestions. Personally, I like the fact that Google knows which sites I'm most likely to click on in search results, and orders them accordingly. I don't lay awake at night wondering what their mad scientists are going to do with the information that I look at porn now and then. Maybe they'll develop some less-annoying porn ads for me to look at.

catastrophile wrote:I don't know how actively people consider that in order to make suggestions, something has to look at what you're typing

Okay, this is a point that privacy nuts always bring up that I never understood. Yes, a heuristic has to analyze what you're typing to make suggestions. Provided that the heuristic doesn't beam your infoez back to Google-- and, to my knowledge, Google does nothing of the sort-- there is no privacy issue. The heuristic doesn't "know" about your surfing habits any more than a toaster "knows" that you prefer your toast a little less toasted because you have the dial set to 2. The same goes for their targeted advertisements. I get the sense that the people that go on about invasion of privacy just have no effing clue how these systems even work.

catastrophile wrote:It was doing odd things with the spamusement text box just now as I was posting, so I switched browsers.

Yeah, I've noticed refresh problems with textareas in general, not just on Spamusement. Generally they seem to sort themselves out after enough proximal activity (or activity in general), but that's hardly acceptable. But, beta, whatever. Also, for some reason Spamusement is currently being really slow in Firefox, so I'm browsing in Chrome, which seems to be faster.

smrq wrote:I get the sense that the people that go on about invasion of privacy just have no effing clue how these systems even work.

Isn't there a lot of those sorts on Slashdot? You can say many things about the users of that place, but I'm not sure "lack of technical savvy" is one of them. Then again, maybe they're just idiots that speak confidently enough to fool a relative layman like myself. There are obviously risks, but I'm not particularly worried about Google suddenly turning on me.

smrq wrote:I get the sense that the people that go on about invasion of privacy just have no effing clue how these systems even work.

Isn't there a lot of those sorts on Slashdot? You can say many things about the users of that place, but I'm not sure "lack of technical savvy" is one of them. Then again, maybe they're just idiots that speak confidently enough to fool a relative layman like myself. There are obviously risks, but I'm not particularly worried about Google suddenly turning on me.

well, as an aspiring privacy nut i will try to articulate the message of these kinds of privacy concerns.

yes, for the vast majority of people there is probably no reason to worry about what you are surfing on the internet. but for someone like myself who does politically active work on the side, it can be worrisome to have a piece of software on your computer which not only records your browsing habits, but sends the data back to a central database possibly (probably) tied to your IP address.

it would not take much for a government agency abusing its jurisdiction (*cough*) to decide to make a law case against my browsing habits just by tracing my IP back to my computer. because you know that the ISP and telecoms will protect your private data in the event of an unlawful investigation.

so yeah, it's a concern for those of us who know that the data can be used illegally. and yes, it's a concern for any internet traffic, but we don't need to make it that much easier for the illegalities to be carried out on us.

ntw3001 wrote:Sass has to come from the heart, not from the shirt.

traubster wrote:I find it irritating whenever I walk through a cemetery and there's not one gravestone that reads something like, "We're all grateful that he's dead. Sorry if he owed you money."

Yeah, I understand the concern if that sort of system was actually to be put into place-- that's an obvious invasion of privacy, and certainly has the potential for abuse. I'm more speaking against the self-proclaimed security aficionados who think, for example, that Google is reading your email because their advertisement software delivers targeted ads based on automated gathered data. What these people always fail to realize is that no matter how many algorithms are operating on your information, as long as the results are not sent to anyone but yourself (again, targeted ads are the obvious example) then there is no privacy issue.